NWRUG

North West Ruby User Group

Get In The C - Ruby's Foreign Function Interface

Thursday 21st March 6:30pm at On the Beach offices, Aeroworks

We all love Ruby for its expressiveness. It's perfect for high-level domain modelling and its rich syntax allows us to build complex applications that are straightforward to reason with and maintain. But what if you need to skip the performance overhead of the Ruby interpreter and run some optimised native code? Or use a third party tool or library that's written in a lower-level language?

In this talk, Sean Handley takes us through the process of building bindings in Ruby using FFI, unlocking the power of lower-level languages like C and Rust without giving up Ruby's expressive syntax. He'll discuss how computers actually execute subroutines, what libFFI does behind the scenes to enable the Ruby interpreter to call native functions, and explain the features of Ruby's FFI gem with some real-world examples.

About the speaker

Sean Handley is a senior software engineer at Stuart, a last-mile delivery company based in Paris. He mainly writes code in Ruby and Elixir but loves to experiment with other languages.

The schedule

  • 6:30pm Food and drinks, provided by On The Beach
  • 7:00pm The talk: Get In The C - Ruby's Foreign Function Interface
  • 7:30pm Post-talk drinks and chat and socialising

Register on Meetup

Although registration isn't required, it would really help our hosts plan the food for the night if you could let us know via our Meetup page whether you will be attending or not.

The location

On the Beach offices, Aeroworks 5 Adair St, Manchester, M1 2NQ.

About NWRUG events

Our events are free and open to anyone with an interest in Ruby, regardless of experience level. There is no need to register, just show up on the day! We want to keep NWRUG as welcoming and inclusive as possible so we ask that all attendies follow our Code of conduct. If you have any questions, get in touch.